Ca$hMoney

10th CD candidate Jim Whitehead “has raised $264,521.87 from 491 individual donors with expenditures totaling just $21,060.65” since his February 19th announcement of candidacy for the late Rep. Charlie Norwood’s open House seat, according to a press release.

I don’t believe that is accurate. If I remember correctly, none of the legislators who ran for the sixth raised a penny before Sine Die. Also they reported any gift received immediately on their Senate disclosures.

A little bit of trivia, you can thank the legislature’s very own Jean-Luc Picard (Doug Teper) for the ability of legislators to raise money for federal office during the session.

Hard to believe now, but Teper was pondering a run for (I believe) the 4th district sometime in the mid ’90’s and he sued (I believe Teper v Miller) to get the provision overturned that prevented federal candidates from raising money who were also in the legislature.

My forecast model gave Whitehead 30-35%, Broun 25-27%, Greene 20-23%, and then from 1-9% for each of the remainging candidates. This is, of course, assuming that each of the candidates gets his/her name on the ballot. My model, however, was only able to expain 3/5 of the variance in special elections to the U.S. House. Furthermore, with the announcement of Whiteheads $250K+ in the bank…it would not be suprising if many of the candidates started dropping out of the race. This district may be too far gone for the Dems to take, considering that if all but one of the Dem. candidates dropped out, and Dem voter turn out remained constant, the percentage of the vote received would be around 30%. Terry Holley needs to stop thinking that the 50,000+ votes cast for him in November were votes for him. They were votes for a Democrat, and I would not be suprised to see him beat out by a different Democratic candidate.

Jeff
Just because we disagree does not mean that my forecast model is not credible. I did not just pull the model out of thin air. Opinions and science are different…but I suppose the GOP’s idea of science is a matter of opinion.